26 Sep 2017

Government  will  have phased out the use of bolus system on cattle and replaced it with electronic ear tag by December 2017 country wide. 

In an interview, Veterinary Services director, Dr Letlhogile Modisa said bolus replacement campaign was implemented in two phases, where phase I started in 2011 which aimed at  linking the bolus inside the animal with a single visible tag on the right ear of all cattle with bolus. 

Phase I of the campaign, he said was run by the Department of Veterinary Services with farmers only tasked with presenting their animals on set dates. 

He said Phase II started in 2014 with complete external identification using combination tags, a digital tag(knob) on the left ear and an analogue tag on the right ear. 

He said unlike Phase I which was DVS driven, Phase II was farmers centric, with farmers buying tags and tagging their cattle while DVS supposedly doing the technical backstopping. 

Both phases of the campaign, he said started simultaneously in all veterinary districts in the country except in Zone two (Northwest district), Zone seven (Selibe Phikwe) and Zone one (Chobe). 

He noted that the combo tagging exercise has so far been rolled out to two reaming zones being zone two and seven as government aided project while zone one will also be covered in November 2017 also as a government aided undertaking. 

“Currently, farmers buy their own tags and tag their own animals. It is only in selected districts, that is, Northwest, Chobe and Selebi-Phikwe, that the ministry aided the initial identification of animals through tagging with the understanding that farmers from those district will subsequently continue with it at their own expense like the rest of the country,” he stated. 

Asked about what motivated the move to phase out the bolus system to electronic ear tagging, Dr Modisa explained that bolus amongst its advantages had a couple of disadvantages which warranted its phasing off and key amongst them were issues of lack of visibility. 

He said since the bolus was embedded in the forestomach, it needed specialised equipment to read hence the required equipment came at a cost to the farmers and typically there was lack of uptake by farmers, resulting in DVS personnel having to do all the reading country wide to confirm identified animals. 

“With electronic tags, one needs just sharp eye sight to see and read the tag and be able to note animals that have been uniquely identified. 

The overt visibility associated with ear tagging eliminates cost incurred by farmers associated wherein farmers used to move animals assuming they have been bloused only to realise otherwise at point of sale, hence forced to transport the animals back to point of origin,” he said. 

Dr Modisa further said  that application technicality was also an issue of concern with the bolus system as a certain level of training and certification for bolus insertion was required, a necessity which lacked amongst farmers hence restricting all the chores to DVS. 

He said, with electronic tags, farmers could tag their own cattle without needing help from DVS personnel. 

He stated that electronic tags also have other integration advantages over bolus which may include night visibility improvement when made reflective. 

He however highlighted that the campaign to move from bolus to electronic ear tagging has been faced with challenges largely those centers around difficulty in weaning farmers from dependency on the ministry to continue tagging and capturing data for the farmers. 

He said a lot of farmers were failing to graduate to independent status of buying tags, tagging all animals, capturing data from tagged animals, transferring animals amongst themselves at sales, removing dead or slaughtered animals from their account in the system. 

That, he said had led to situations where the system was  bloated with animals that do not exist on the ground because keepers had failed to remove them from their account. 

He said some animals remained untagged simply because farmers are unwilling to buy tags adding that such shortfalls from the farmers still placed a huge burden on extension area officers to plug the gabs. 

Dr Modisa further cautioned farmers against tagging only a few from the heard for the purpose of selling adding that tagging was  required by the law. 

He emphasised the importance of tagging cattle saying it was a contemporary market requirement that cattle should be traceable from farm to fork and electronic ear tagging accord that hence allowing market access by Botswana farmers. ENDS